Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded): 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

In the New York Times bestseller Brain Rules, Dr. John Medina, a molecular biologist, shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we teach our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a brain rule - what scientists know for sure about how our brains work - and then offers transformative ideas for our daily lives. Medina’s fascinating stories and infectious sense of humor breathe life into brain science.

Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

In his New York Times best seller Brain Rules, Dr. John Medina told us how our brains really work—and why we ought to redesign our workplaces and schools. Now, in Brain Rules for Baby, he shares what the latest science says about how to raise smart and happy children from zero to five.

Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

Meet Emily and Paul: The parents of two young children, Emily is the newly promoted VP of marketing at a large corporation while Paul works from home or from clients' offices as an independent IT consultant. Their lives, like all of ours, are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, yet more emails, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm has become a seemingly insurmountable task.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Mindset is one of those rare audio books that can help you make positive changes in your life and at the same time see the world in a new way. A leading expert in motivation and personality psychology, Carol Dweck has discovered in more than 20 years of research that our mindset is not a minor personality quirk: it creates our whole mental world. It explains how we become optimistic or pessimistic. It shapes our goals, our attitude toward work, and ultimately predicts whether or not we will fulfull our potential.

Brain Rules for Baby (Updated and Expanded): How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

In Brain Rules for Baby, Dr. John Medina shares what the latest science says about how to raise smart and happy children from zero to five. This book is destined to revolutionize parenting. Just one of the surprises: The best way to get your children into the college of their choice? Teach them impulse control. Brain Rules for Baby bridges the gap between what scientists know and what parents practice.

Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and Be More Productive

Do you ever feel like you're too busy, too stressed, or just too distracted to concentrate and get work done? In Unlimited Memory you'll learn how the world's best memory masters get themselves to concentrate at will, anytime they want. When you can easily focus and concentrate on the task at hand and store and recall useful information, you can easily double your productivity and eliminate wasted time, stress, and mistakes at work. In this book you'll find all the tools, strategies, and techniques you need to improve your memory.

Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing

Brainfluence explains how to practically apply neuroscience and behavior technology and behavior research to better market to consumers by understanding their decision patterns. This application, called neuromarketing, studies the way the brain responds to various cognitive and sensory marketing stimuli. Analysts use this to measure a consumer's preference, what a customer reacts to, and why consumers make certain decisions.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career of studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill.

The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life

Present moment awareness is an essential ingredient in life if one expects to experience any degree of authentic peace and contentment. It has been acknowledged for centuries as the cornerstone of spiritual awakening in all traditions of Eastern thought. In the West, however, it is still a relatively unrecognized concept for living. The Western mind is always restless, never content with the moment.

Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

To most of us, learning something 'the hard way' implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head and will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.

Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

The path to personal and professional fulfillment is rarely straight. Ask anyone who has achieved his or her biggest goals or whose relationships thrive, and you'll hear stories of many unexpected detours along the way. What separates those who master these challenges and those who get derailed? The answer is agility - emotional agility.

BBQ Fan says:"Excellent subject but listening is not everyone's cup of tea"

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Why do some products capture our attention, while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? This audiobook introduces listeners to the "Hook Model," a four steps process companies use to build customer habits. Through consecutive hook cycles, successful products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back repeatedly - without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging. Hooked is a guide to building products people can't put down.

The Art of Mental Training: A Guide to Performance Excellence, Collector's Edition

Achieve the champion mindset for peak performance. Reach new levels of success and mental toughness with this ultimate guide. Learn the "Science of Success" and prepare to excel. In this concise and highly acclaimed training guide, Peak Performance Coach DC Gonzalez teaches a blend of unique mental training technologies, sports psychology essentials, and peak performance methods that are effective and motivational. Get ready to increase your self-belief, self-confidence, and mental toughness using this powerful guide designed to help you reach new levels of success, sports performance and personal development.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

From Daniel H. Pink, the author of the groundbreaking best seller A Whole New Mind, comes his next big idea book: a paradigm-changing examination of what truly motivates us and how to harness that knowledge to find greater satisfaction in our lives and our work.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica - how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. Distilling a vast array of information into these two vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new understanding of human nature.

Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy but are willing to pay premium prices for. How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer.

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: Success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs. But in How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues for a very different understanding of what makes a successful child. Drawing on groundbreaking research in neuroscience, economics, and psychology, Tough shows that the qualities that matter most have less to do with IQ and more to do with character: skills like grit, curiosity, conscientiousness, and optimism.

The Brain That Changes Itself: Personal Triumphs from the Frontiers of Brain Science

In this revolutionary look at the brain, best-selling author, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, M.D., introduces both the brilliant scientists championing this new science of neuroplasticity and the astonishing progress of the people whose lives they've transformed.

Introducing principles we can all use, as well as a riveting collection of case histories, The Brain That Changes Itself has "implications for all human beings, not to mention human culture, human learning and human history."

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It

Based on Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal's wildly popular course The Science of Willpower,The Willpower Instinct is the first book to explain the new science of self-control and how it can be harnessed to improve our health, happiness, and productivity. Informed by the latest research and combining cutting-edge insights from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine, The Willpower Instinct explains exactly what willpower is, how it works, and why it matters.

Publisher's Summary

Most of us have no idea what's really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know - such as the brain's need for physical activity to work at its best. How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget - and so important to repeat - new information? Is it true that men and women have different brains?

In Brain Rules, molecular biologist Dr. John Medina shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we teach our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a brain rule - what scientists know for sure about how our brains work - and then offers transformative ideas for our daily lives.

Medina's fascinating stories and sense of humor breathe life into brain science. You'll learn why Michael Jordan was no good at baseball. You'll peer over a surgeon's shoulder as he finds, to his surprise, that we have a "Jennifer Aniston neuron". You'll meet a boy who has an amazing memory for music but can't tie his own shoes.

Sick of "how to" books, as an avid listener of audiobooks, I like well researched, well presented, compressed books that are narrated by the author. this one scores on all counts. as if they had audio rather then print in mind all along!

As an academic student I've long since been looking for someone to give me the gist of how to study, without patronizing tones and "you can do it" over piano music. Medina really gives you intuitive yet academic based understanding of what methods are best to help you study

This book has finally caused me to get off the computer and go excercise, for my brain's sake.

I enjoyed the book and thought that it was written in an accessible and entertaining manner. The points are familiar and not surprising to those working in the field. However, I'm a psychologist and many of my patients are not aware of the extreme impact that lack of exercise, stress and sleep have on the brain and your ability to think.

I believe that this book was written with the intent to make work and school environments more human places - that support learning and creativity. Many people berate themselves because they simply feel like they don't measure up when it's really an environment that is bad for brains.

Medina has made an excellent case for changing the world for the better and I hope that teachers and managers take notice.

A very brainy book by an entertaining scientist. Throughly enjoyed listening to it and I have recommended it to at least 5 other friends.

Because of this book I am now walking 5 days a week for at least 30 minutes per day. When you listen to this book and understand how 30 minutes a day of walking can make a difference it makes an impression. It is amazing how more motivating it is to walk for your brain vs. your figure.

Bottom line - download Brain Rules and go for a walk, you will thank Dr. Medina in the morning.

I am not into what the author calls "Brain Science," but I am interested in educational psychology. This book has provided the connections I need. The organization of the book is sound, making the points both memorable and valuable. He has a nice blend of technical jargon and pop language, enough so that (I believe) any novice with the motivation to learn about how the brain functions can learn. This book provides a great model for how scientific (both the hard sciences and social sciences) work can be translated to a larger audience. I actually enjoyed the narrator, he seemed to have emotion behind his voice that I was able to connect to.

My only complaint about the book was the last chapters. He went from what I believed to be fascinating ideas to "men are different from women", and "children are natural scientists." I can't help thinking he was pandering to his family. (I suppose is fine, I might do the same thing in my books) I am a huge fan of Tannen, but I think her work was really smashed into this book. I would suggest limiting the book to ten rules (Oh, and I would change the rules approach, a bit cliche for me) Other than that, so far it has been my favorite book on audible.

I was suspicious about a quote from an interview between Mike Wallace and Frank Lloyd at 6:10 of Chapter 2. It quotes Frank Lloyd Wright as saying to tear down St. Patrick's Cathedral. Hmm... I looked it up in the printed copy of the book by searching the text on Amazon and Google Books. It does not have that quote. In fact, the interview is very different. I check with other sources; the printed copy, not this audiobook, matches the actual interview. I listed for the next 2 minutes and found several more things that had changed. Some were facts, some were grammar. A date was changed, "like" was changed to "such as", etc. This audio book is apparently from a draft before it was fact-checked and grammar-checked. Misquoting Frank Lloyd Wright as saying to tear down St. Patrick's Cathedral might direclty relate to what the author is saying, but if the author has that wrong, what else is wrong in the rest of the book? Can the listeners trust this unfact-checked and unproofed draft of the book? I can't. I want accuracy over ease, so I guess I'll have to read the printed copy.

I am currently studying for a degree in psychology. I found this book very relevant. It's entertaining and relates scientific principles to everyday events making the information easy to digest and remember. The info. on the complimentary web page an extra bonus. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the mind at any level.

This book has some very interesting thoughts and concepts worth considering. You can read the publisher's review or the audible summary to get a feel for the content.

I enjoyed it and learned a few things from it. My first criteria for a 5 star book is: Did I learn something? If so, are there significant negatives which detract from the book?

In this case, yes, I learned, and, no, there is nothing particularly negative about this book.

I expected, based on the other reviews, to have to struggle through horrible narration. I think we're polluted by over produced, air brushed entertainment. Ok, the guys voice isn't Hollywood---so what? It's a science book, not Shakespeare. Get over it. The narration is fine. You'd have to ignore the content and concentrate on the voice to hear the "cracks" in his voice that others have found so offensive. Good grief---must everything be sanitized and packaged for the American audience?

All the ideas are not new, but still, it's nice to have these ideas organized in one book.

If you're expecting a page turner, save your credits. If you think it's worth your time to learn a couple of new things, go for it.

This is was an excellent read for someone who is not trained in brain science but interested in understanding how the brain works. If you have children and are interested in helping them learn, you will find this one interesting - that's why I chose it. It has changed how I am with my boys, trying to slow down and let them be explorers.

The passion of the author brings this audiobook to life in your head and makes the concepts stick, he's a remarkable narrator. For me the sign of a good book in this category is just how practical it is to apply and that's the frame of my review.

As a corporate trainer and facilitator I found the practical tips in this book, and demonstrated throughout by the author in the way to book is written, powerful and easy to apply. For me the most useful ideas that I now apply daily are:

- People don’t pay attention to boring things. You have to grab attention, this gives you 10 minutes to get your point across and at ten minutes grab their attention again but how...

- With something emotional and relevant! The idea is to use emotionally competent stimulus every 10 minutes to grab the attention. The author does this in, often funny, visual descriptions of the scientists he references and the stories he tells. See if you can forget the story about the burglary, the trainee surgeon or the walk to nursery after listening to this book. These simple stories are burned on my memory.

I'm in the process of looking at all the training presentations I write and deliver. I was still working under the notion of 20 minute attention span and now I can see why some of my sessions are successful - those with a big enough hook and relevant stories within - and the others well they were less effective.

There is so much more goodness in this book, for example the exercise chapter provides so much motivation to get moving. I liked being able to see the author in the follow up videos (which confirmed his genuine passion and belief in his message) and the chapter summaries at brainrules.com are an excellent reminder of the main points.

Now I wonder if I can incorporate the 26 minute afternoon nap (for a 34% performance gain) into what we do?

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

Malcolm Russell

South Africa

5/18/11

Overall

"Mind.. your body!"

John Medina???s ability to speak passionately and engagingly makes this book a real treat! And hey! Mind and body are NOT two separate ???bits???. Just a small investment in getting a bit more oxygen upstairs will make all the difference. As someone once famously said, ???It???s not rocket surgery!??? But it is brain science ??? delivered in a chatty, sometimes mischievous but always accessible way. So do your body and your brain a favour ??? it beats la dolce viagra any day!

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Miss

1/26/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Great book"

I teach art and design to large groups of students. I have put lots of the ideas in this into practice to great effect. I will be listening to this book again.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Dr V

1/25/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Great book"

As a clinical psychologist this book is a must read. A well presented book which was easy to follow and made lots of sense.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

BR

Harlow, United Kingdom

12/2/13

Overall

Performance

Story

"A fabulous listen!"

If you could sum up Brain Rules in three words, what would they be?

InsightfulChallengingClear

What did you like best about this story?

Brain Rules is extremely well written; it flows and has delightful, personal analogies to maintain its delight (and of course reinforce the point of the brain needing to regularly refocus its attention. This is an audiobook that you can dip into and out of since there are separate brain rules. Use the accompanying web materials and you have a brilliant resource for how we think. And why children can trick us!

Which scene did you most enjoy?

I most enjoyed the seen with John and his son. 'Danger!' was the word quietly uttered but it wasn't heeded. Ouch!

Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

It made me smile and want even more to put the words into action.

Any additional comments?

A must-listen for anyone interested in how the brain works. It should be compulsory training for psychology courses but it's so well written and so tangible for the 'person in the street' wanting to better their brain.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

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